Dreaming of a White… Birthday?

I have to admit, I’ve never seen snow on my birthday before. I was born in Ohio, and I lived in Maryland and Arkansas. I had the opportunity, but never in my life has it happened. It’s kind of a shock, and I’m not sure what I think.

There has been so much snow that we’ve been unable to leave the house for 2 days. Just today, I drove in the snow for the first time.  It was a little tough to get through, and a little slippery, but I drove slowly and it was ok. I had a private lesson at the yarn shop and someone dropped off a big bag of things she just wanted me to finish for her – at my hourly rate! It was worth leaving the house today.

It was nice to just get out and knit while the kitchen renovation was going on. They made some real progress before I left. Check this out:

And by the time I got home, it looked like this:

Pretty marked improvement, no? I should point out that the contractors on this job came out to our house on the 2 days we were snowed in. I told them not to risk their lives driving in that weather just to work on our kitchen, but they were here (a little late on one day, but they made it), and they worked. Best contractors ever. They have a few hours of work left to do, so they are coming back tomorrow. Seriously dedicated people, these guys.

On Monday our countertops will be installed, and on Tuesday our gas cooktop and the sink will be hooked up. At that point we will have a fully functioning kitchen again!

Another good thing about these contractors is that they are good with the cats. One of them has 4 cats of his own, so he gets it. He also has 2 dogs he rescued. The guys were very happy when Wesley wanted to lie in the middle of the work zone because they got to pet him. The guys thought Duck was cute when he explored the demoed kitchen. The lead contractor even got Serra to let him pet her. I let the little kittens roam the living room/office area right outside of their room, and the contractors actually enjoyed watching them. It turns out, one of the guys knows how to knit as well. Is it too good to be true?

I realized recently that I will have the chance here on my blog to chronicle a foster kitten growing up. This excites me more than I expected. The best part is that here, I have an audience who is completely willing to look at all the adorable pictures that I take of my newly acquired feline son.

Duck has a habit of taking a drink out of my glass. He seems to really like my tea.

He’s also good with the other, littler foster kittens. These are some buddy shots of Duck with Edward:

Is this not the cutest?

And we can’t forget Lambie, Duck’s poor sister who is stuck here. She had a spay appointment for the day that the huge snowfall started. We couldn’t get out, so she couldn’t make her appointment. I have to reschedule when the shelter gets back in working order. In the meantime, Lamb is pretty sure that she’s part of the family. She sleeps with me, and she loves the toys I make for her. Ok, I don’t exactly make them for her, but Lamb loves to steal my swatches from my knitting projects. I’m sending them with her to the shelter so she will have them in her new home.

Lamb carries these swatches with her everywhere, and she growls when other cats get too close while she is playing with them. Maybe I should be spending my remaining time with Lamb making her toys so that she will have them long past her adoption. I really will miss her. Doesn’t anyone I know want a sweet, beautiful black kitten? She gives kisses…

While I was out

Last week, I was in San Francisco. I mostly spend my time out there on social calls, barely getting any rest. Michael  goes for work, and this time he was in meetings all day, every day. We are mighty busy while we are there, but I really love going back.

Before the trip, Duck and Lamb wanted us to know that they were going to miss us. They even offered to go.

But I doubt they’d make it through airport security.

Remarkably, I don’t think I really took many pictures of the trip. I took pictures of the yarn I bought at my favorite yarn store. I took pictures of the mitten I have in progress. Somehow, I just couldn’t seem to get pictures of my friends or the city. It’s a shame, but I will be back.

On the plane ride, I cast on a Bella’s Mittens. The version I made for my friend Vickie was too small for my hands, even before I felted it, so I used a larger needle (size 9) and a slightly thicker yarn (Rowan Cocoon). So far, the first mitten seems to fit. I am going to use it for a shop sample for the class I am teaching on these mittens. I figure it’s a good way to teach magic loop knitting and how to do cables.

By the time I left Knit Night on Wednesday, I finished the first mitten. These really work up fast, and might make good Christmas gifts…

So, of course, while I was gone it snowed. I can’t say for sure how much, but there was some snow on the ground when we got home. In fact, if you look at the back yard, you can see we have two seasons in one. Pick a lane, Mother Nature!

On the left we have winter, and on the right, fall.

The kittens continued to thrive while I was out. This is the first time I’ve ever had to leave foster kittens at the house, and I had to wonder how they would do without me. I must have good judgment in sitters because, I’ll tell you, those kittens are huge! Jacob made weight today, but he’s so far ahead of the others that he won’t get to go up for adoption while he’s little. It’s all well and good, because he’s fluffy and cute. I managed to get pictures of all but Bella since I’ve been home.

They have lost a lot of the baby look in the few days I was gone. They’ve also gotten really playful. Some of them (like Emmett and Rosalie) are even interested in people as playmates. Edward seems to have lost his mind – who knows what that boy was thinking when he chose to lay on my shoulder in the head stand position!

Duck and Lamb are still doing well. Lambie finally got cleared of the whole ringworm thing. The problem is, she is a bigger black kitten, and that makes her less attractive to potential adopters. Plus, Halloween is coming up soon, and I just don’t think it’s the right time to send her back. We’re going to have her spayed on Wednesday, and then I’ll try to get her a return appointment for November 1st, after Halloween.

I have no idea how Duck is going to take the loss of Lamb. She’s  been living with so long that she’s practically family. I have to admit, I’m not sure I can take her to the shelter. I may have to make Michael do the dirty work for me, or at least go with me. I just feel like such a jerk. She’s wonderful, really, but five cats is too many for me. Four is questionable with all the extra kittens that wander through here. Luckily, Duck is pretty easy-going. He doesn’t demand a lot of attention, and he plays well by himself. The thing is, this is all true while he has another kitten in the house who happens to be his age. He may not be so easy without a young playmate. Fortunately, Serra likes Duck a lot. She bathes him in the morning when they wake up, and she tries on occasion to play chase with him. Wesley is indifferent to the little guy, and Buttercup has decided that she can sleep on the couch with the kittens, but only if she is on the back of it while they are on the seat.  Butters still refuses to stay in my lap if Duck approaches us. Still, it’s a start. She’s way cooler with Duck than she was with Serra at this point.

In addition to all the kittens and the classes, we have another renovation going on this week. Fortunately, I’m not doing it this time – we have professionals.

This is my kitchen. We’re having the cabinets re-faced and we’re having silestone countertops installed. Fortunately, this process only takes a week, so I’ll have the kitchen back soon enough. I should get to the painting that got put on hold when the floors went in, but I think I hear the yarn shop calling…

Cuties to Tide You Over

First things first: Alice is still alive. In fact, she’s started gaining weight – she’s up 25% from where she was when I left for Houston. That is pretty cool. However, you should get a load of her next to Jacob – the difference is staggering. He is about 2.5 times her weight.

It’s hard to believe these are litter mates.

The Twilight kittens have made it to another defining moment in kitten development: they’ve pulled all the toilet paper off the roll. I am so proud! It seems odd to say that, but I had a brief concern that the little ones wouldn’t be alive at this point, so I take my miracles where I can get them. The TP destruction just means that they are getting mischievous and looking for things to do.

Little Duck and Lamb are still as cute as ever. I think I can actually see them growing right before my eyes. Look at them:

I worried that Duck would be lonely while we were out of town last week, but he seems to be handling us traveling just fine. Serra, on the other hand, freaked out. For the first time in her life, Serra chose to pee in something other than her litter box – she used our (thankfully not yet packed) suitcase. I doused it with tons of Nature’s Miracle, and later tonight after I finish packing I am going to take my wet vac to the thing. I may have lost a suitcase.

The thing to remember here is, despite popular belief, it was not anger at us that drove Serra’s new choice of litter box. Barring a medical problem, it was most likely stress. When we take the suitcase out of the closet, it means that we are going to leave her and she has no idea when we are coming back. Serra’s very attached to me, so I am not surprised in the least that my absence makes her anxious. My guess is that she figured I couldn’t leave the house without that bag, so she soiled it to make me stay. Or maybe she just marked it so I would remember that I belong to her and I should come home soon.

There is a saying: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I am not sure who the true originator of this quote is – it’s been attributed to a few different people. In any case, I think a modified version of this statement makes sense when trying to interpret cat behavior: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by anxiety. Thinking about it that way will help you not get mad at the poor cat; rather, you’ll tend to feel a little more sorry for her than anything else. I know that there are plenty of people who just won’t see it that way, but I think it says more about those people than the cat. Personally, I’d rather not make up a reason to be mad at a creature (or person for that matter) when I don’t have to be. Anger takes too much energy for that.

I’ll give you another example of a commonly misinterpreted behavior: biting. Many believe that when a cat bites you, she’s just being mean. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You are way bigger than any cat – that alone can be intimidating. Maybe you unknowingly touched the cat in a place that hurt her. Or maybe she is redirecting her anxiety about environmental stresses (other cats, moving, new people in the house…) at you, a person who just happens to be in the way. In all of those cases, it isn’t anger, it’s stress. Having endured extreme stress on occasion, I understand what it’s like to have too much on your plate. Heck, I’d bite too if I weren’t afraid of catching something. In any case, I feel sorry for a cat that feels so backed into a corner that she has to bite me.

Those are my words of wisdom for this week. Who knows, maybe they’ll change the way you see life.

Edit: I always seem to speak too soon. I went in to visit the kittens tonight, and Alice was dead. It couldn’t have been more than an hour ago since she wasn’t cold yet and rigor mortis still hasn’t set in. At least it didn’t happen with the sitter.

Vampires DO have reflections

I have been so terrible about getting the individual shots of the kittens up this time. I feel especially bad about it because Renée died without a picture of her own. I have had only about 2 or 3 kittens die before I got a picture of them, but wouldn’t you know, they were all black kittens. The first was Fulton, my very first foster kitten to die. He was an older kitten, about 6 weeks old. He is the only one I don’t have a single picture of. (And yes, I can name most of the kittens I’ve fostered, and if I see a picture of the group, I can name them all.)

So anyway, I think it is way past time to introduce the kittens to you. Plus, I think it will help my wonderful friend, Tammy, tell the kittens apart.

Alice looks a little rough. She is a bit smaller than the day I got her, and I really don’t expect her to survive. On the other hand, Duck lived even though he was really sick for a long time.

Bella is supercute! She loves to gently pounce on your ankles, and she chatters just a bit when you play with her. The poor thing has already had mats in her fur – her new family will have to brush her all the time.

Edward is so handsome! His coat is a smoke color rather than all black. It’s really hard to get his true color with the camera flash, so sometime I’ll take him into a room with a skylight so I can get a really good shot of him. He is very quiet and quite snuggly.

Poor Emmett came to us without a family, but I have to say he blends in with these guys very well. He loves to eat, and for the longest time he was my biggest kitten. I believe he is at least a week older than all the other kittens. He wouldn’t take the bottle on the first few days.

Jacob is a tank. He outweighs the next biggest kitten by about 100g. He is fluffy and vaguely wolf-like when he moves around the room.

This is Rosalie. Michael thinks she is the prettiest kitten (I think it’s Bella). She is pretty playful, and she loves to be picked up.

Renee looked like a much smaller version of Jacob. She was so bright and friendly, looking up at me with her big, blue eyes when she scurried up my leg into my lap. She was pretty special.

I will miss these guys while I am out of town. At least for the first time it’s only two nights. I have 11 cats to kiss before I leave, so I’ll write more later.

When it’s most inconvenient

Don’t count your kittens before they crash.

This day started like every other horrible day in fostering. Michael woke me up to inform me that we needed to go the the shelter because one of the kittens was crashing. That would be Renée, the one who I was so surprised to still have alive. She was still pretty warm, which I thought was a good sign. We caught her early, and usually a kitten caught crashing the earlier stages has a better outcome. We got her to the shelter, and they rushed her back. The foster coordinator came back a few minutes later to tell me that she was dead. It honestly didn’t hit me that hard at first. I waited around while they did a precautionary Panleukopenia snap test. What I wasn’t prepared for is that the test came back positive.

This means many bad things. If one kitten in a litter has Panleuk, all of the kittens are likely to have it. The mortality rate is really high, and it is very contagious. Shelters will go into lockdown while they sanitize, quarantine, and euthanize affected kittens. This year has been particularly bad for that disease here in Colorado. For a foster parent, that means your home is going into quarantine and you can’t foster again for at least 6 months (although if you have a completely separate room, you may be able to continue fostering).

After Renée died, I had to go home and get the other 6 kittens. I worried all the way to the shelter that they would test positive. I was sure that Alice was going to come up positive, given how rough her life has been in the last week. Fortunately, not a single other kitten tested positive. But the complications aren’t over yet.

I am leaving town on Wednesday. Lamb is going to stay with Duck and the other cats until her ringworm test comes back negative. The other 6 kittens need much more supervision. They cannot go back to the shelter because there is nowhere they can be quarantined. If I had to send the little guys back, they’d be euthanized. Luckily, Julie’s going to look after them while I am out of town. The complication with that is Julie is a doula, and she has a client expecting a birth during that same time-frame. My petsitter, fortunately, may be able to give the kittens a feeding or 2 if Julie has to go to a birth. It’s really great that I have people to count on in this sort of emergency, but man – this isn’t cool.

I’m going to owe so many people so big…

Addition and Subtraction

Your favorite knitter/foster parent/blogger/insane do-it-yourself-er is finally back. The whole floor, trim, and most of the touch up painting is done, done, done. I feel so much better now.

I had a serious case of start-itis near the end of the flooring project. I think the stress and chaos of living in a construction zone made me want to escape, so I just kept starting new yarn projects. I even obsessed about plans to make a crocheted sock – my mind was racing with thoughts about how to construct the thing and how exactly I wanted to do the ribbing – to the point that I had to get out of bed one night and start crocheting. I guess when a muse takes notice of one of my ideas, she won’t let it go until we get into action. I think it would be most helpful if we took inventory of what is on the hooks and needles again.

Knittin’

1. Crocheted Sock – I am going to turn this one into a class. Unlike knit socks, I consider crochet socks to be an advanced beginner project. Yes, the hook is small (but you could make a worsted weight sock with a slightly bigger hook), but you only really need to know how to single crochet to start a sock. In my class I am going to teach skills like increasing, decreasing, and even how to crochet to fit. Socks are really great for teaching technique.

2. Mr. Greenjeans Cardigan – I really need to start layering now that I live somewhere it snows. It seems like a cardigan is the easiest way to get started.

(All of the following will be Ravelry links)

3. Two-in-one socks – I tried this technique, but it was so slow going that I had to admit I hated it. I separated the socks and began knitting them separately. I am much happier now, but I did learn that my gauge is much tighter when I knit double-stranded.

4. Robert’s Boot Socks – These are going to be much like kilt hose, but at the same time more plain. Robert is my brother in the Marines. He wanted a good pair of thick socks for hiking, and he really liked the pictures of some kilt hose I made in the past, so he asked for some. The thing is, I started it using Cascade 220. Somewhere after I made the first 20% or so of the first sock, I realized that I should have used a superwash yarn because the hiking will most likely felt the things. Does anyone know if Cascade Superwash comes in khaki?

5. Cat Couch – I started working on this project for the cats again when I started teaching classes. I really owe them something nice, and I now I’m starting to owe them lots of nice things for neglecting them. I am such a bad mom.

6. Beaded Deep Space – This is a Christmas project for a friend. I do hope to finish it for this Christmas, but it may have to wait for next. The long floor project robbed me of quite a bit of time.

7. Colorado Gloves – I am actually thinking of turning these into mittens or fingerless gloves. I realized that the fingers make it way too slippery to wear the gloves while knitting or driving, and they wouldn’t be nearly as warm as mittens.

I also took something out of my project list recently – the Earl Grey socks. I know now, without a shred of doubt, that I am allergic to alpaca. Sometimes when I help a client at the store, my throat starts to itch and then swell up. Every single time I ask the client what fiber she is using, it turns out to be alpaca. I was seriously crushed to learn this because alpaca fiber is incredibly soft and warm – as a matter of fact, it would make a great winter blanket. In the end, I rehomed this project and some unspun alpaca fiber to my friend, Julie. I know she’ll take good care of it.

Kittens

In the time when I was absent, the kittens continued to grow and change. Goose made weight, and I had to return her earlier than I expected. She is incredibly friendly. Too friendly. Every night since I got the Twilight kittens, she got to sleep with us. In the middle of the night Goosie would wake up so happy, purring and rubbing her face against mine and Michael’s. While it was perhaps the sweetest way to wake up, it was still waking up. Multiple times a night. I was a wreck.

I was completely flattered that Goose loved us so much.

Lambie is still with me. She had a lesion on her muzzle that looked suspiciously like ringworm. Since the shelter I currently volunteer for puts kittens with ringworm down (they are working to change that policy, just slowly), I had Lamb’s spot checked. What a mistake. She is still with me because the test came back positive even though the lesion cleared up within 3 days. As anyone who reads my blog regularly should know by now, no ringworm has ever cleared up that fast. Ever. While the vet agrees with me that it is probably a false positive due to cross-contamination, they have to wait until Lamb has a negative test to release her for adoption. The test takes 2 weeks for a negative result. I am leaving for a trip before that test comes back, so I was distressed. Fortunately, the shelter vet has a plan – they’ll treat her with lyme-sulfur and put her up for adoption with a note that she was possibly exposed to ringworm. It means she will be in a cage by herself, which makes me really sad. However, she is a black kitten. Nice as she is, people are superstitious about black cats, and the older she gets, the less adoptable Lamb will be. I cannot stand the thought that my baby will be overlooked because her coat is the “wrong” color. You could do a lot worse than Lamb. Lambie loves to give kisses, and she really loves yarn-based cat toys. And face it – she’s beautiful.

That Duck character – well, where do I begin. I’ve loved other foster kittens. I loved Carrot, who found a perfect home right before I left San Francisco. I knew when her new mother started to speak to me that Carrot was meant for her, the only person good enough for my baby. I loved Margo, a black momcat whom I fostered long before I started this blog. She has bright orange eyes, and she used to pull your face to hers with her paw so she would kiss you. She also had this pure joy that you couldn’t help catching. I loved Roman, the first foster kitten that I really had to fight to keep alive. He died in the end, but I thought if he lived that I might not be able to let go. I also loved Gareth, who survived Panleuk with some brain damage. He didn’t seem to have a good flight instinct when a situation was dangerous. He also couldn’t figure out simple obstacles like glass doors. He got into my entertainment center once, through an open glass door. The other door was closed. As Gareth tried to get out of the closed glass door, he started to panic. He threw himself against the glass, not noticing that there was  a way to freedom just inches away. He also panicked if he was alone. It was heartbreaking to realize what he was going through. I would have kept him, too, if a woman hadn’t come along who inquired about him, left the adoption center to really think through what she was getting into, and came back completely prepared to love him the way he needed.

Duck is like the others I’ve loved. He’s handsome. He has a very gentle personality, and nothing really bothers him. He has the innate joy that Margo had. I went through a lot to save him. On October 1, Michael took Duck to the shelter. At 4:00 that afternoon, after his neuter surgery, I adopted him. That’s right, I adopted my first foster kitten. I managed to resist the charms of 183 kittens, only to be suckered in by Duck. Save for a fight he started in his carrier the moment I signed the papers and handed over the adoption fee (Duck was recovering from the anesthesia, and we think he’s a mean drunk), Duck has continued to be the same, wonderful baby cat he always was. And now he’s mine.

The Twilight kittens are all still alive. I truly thought that Renee, at 197g and at least 3-4 weeks of age was going to die, but she is still alive. She’s still tiny, but she is bright and friendly and gaining weight, just a little at a time. Edward and Bella are alive and thriving, as are Jacob, Emmett, and Rosalie. Alice is struggling, but I think even she might survive. She looks awful, but she gains just a little weight most mornings. There will be more photos of them in the future, but they won’t be with me much longer. When we leave town, the kittens are going to other foster homes. They are off the bottle, so the healthier ones can go to any foster home. The little ones will need special care, though. These poor kittens came to me with giardia (I know, what a surprise). When the meds didn’t clear up the infection, the doctors found clostridium in their stool. This is another disease that people can catch, but not as easily as they can catch giardia. You might know other forms of clostridium: botulism, food poisoning, and tetanus. It is also responsible for lethal hospital infections, under the name of clostridium dificile. I think this may be what killed so many of my bottle-feeders in San Francisco. Luckily, there is a treatment – an antibiotic called Amphoral. I think I like that drug, given that it seems to save lives.

So, I believe that you are now caught up. If there is something I missed, please mention it in the comments so that I can be sure to update everyone. Feel free to raise your expectations to the previous level

Completed Projects

Just give up on me. I can’t seem to blog as often as I like, and I spend half my time feeling guilty for not updating. Ok, don’t give up on me, but maybe lower your expectations. Right now, I can’t seem to keep it together.

I’ve completed a lot of projects of all sorts in the last few weeks. I finished putting hardwood on the stairs (I still need to paint the risers, but no big deal there), I finished putting wood in the hallway, and made it about 1/3 of the way into the office. After several disasters with the trim, I ended up having to paint it (which I didn’t want to do, and it took forever!). I also finished the sweater made from my handspun yarn and started a new one. I also sent Chimera, Sylph, Pegasus, and Griffin back to the shelter, where they got adopted immediately. Duck, Goose and Lamb are not quite ready for various reasons.

(click to embiggen)

For a rank amateur, I think I did pretty well with these projects. The people who sold us the wood for the floors made it sound like the installation would be really hard and that I was making a mistake by not having it professionally installed, but I can honestly say I think they were wrong. I will qualify that, though. If you are thinking about installing hardwood floors and just want to save a few bucks, doing it yourself is not the way to go. There are some very frustrating things that can happen while installing floors (for example, though they are supposed to be exactly the same, the boards occasionally varied in width by about 1/16th of an inch, which turns out to matter very much for how the install goes), and you may have to rip out some boards to correct your problem. You also have to occasionally come up with creative solutions to the problems that come up. If, however, you are installing hardwood floors yourself because you like doing home improvement projects, have at. Translating to knit speak – if you are a project knitter, hire a pro. If you are a process knitter, do it yourself.

Despite how it may appear, I am actually not a glutton for punishment. I made plans to buy pre-finished baseboards for the walls. Finishing trim sucks, as I learned when I put the kitten bathroom together. When I went to the home-improvement stores, I learned that the pre-finished trim they had looked cheap and fake. I then decided to buy unfinished trim to stain and varnish myself. For some reason, no type of stain would take properly to the wood, despite the fact that I followed the directions on the cans exactly. In tears, I went to our local paint specialty store and told them what happened. I asked if there was a way to paint over the stain disaster. As luck would have it, there is a primer that you can use to paint over a stained or varnished surface, and then you can finish it with latex paint. The catch is that the primer is oil based, so the clean-up involves mineral spirits.  I could not bring myself to do the priming. I didn’t want to finish my own trim in the first place, and now it was going to take 37 steps to complete. I made every excuse I could not to finish, even resorting to the honest “I just don’t feel like it.”  Luckily, Michael stepped in and helped me finish the trim in the last 2 nights. This was important to completing the flooring because I used the un-floored section of the office as a painting studio. I figured if I got any sort of paint on the sub-floor it wouldn’t matter because it would be covered up. Plus, the office is a place where I can close the door to the cats and open a window to let the fumes out.

This is what the trim looks like when it is against the floor and the walls. What do you think?

I had to install some trim so I could put my desk back. It was so inconvenient to have to use my computer in the living room.

In the time between the floor and the trim, I managed to finish the sweater I made out of my handspun yarn. On the bright side, it’s the best-fitting sweater I’ve made for myself to date. It isn’t too wide and I don’t look like I weigh 50 more pounds when I wear it. However, the sweater is a little shorter than I like. I ran low on yarn, so I figure that I did an ok job given what I had available to me.

While I do have this picture of Lamb snuggling with the sweater in its project bag, I do not yet have a picture of it on myself. We have had only dreary weather since I finished and I want to take a picture in good lighting. Given that we had our first snow this winter on the last day of summer, I think the world owes us a few more bright, sunny days for taking sweater pictures.

The 4 kittens I returned to the shelter on Saturday are all here in this picture, along with Duck, Lamb, and Serra. And Michael. I am happy to say that they are all snuggly, happy kittens and I am proud of the job we did with them.

The kittens who were left behind have been absolutely wonderful to live with. I’ve been sick all day today, so all of them spent at least some time snuggling me. They are mostly here because they had some sort of ailment to overcome as well. Lamb had a spot on her face that had a trace chance of being ringworm (now that she’s got some skin medicine, I am thinking it was a false alarm), so she has to wait 10 days for a fungal culture to come back negative. Goose still had soft stool despite 2 courses of Flagyl (for Giardia). It turns out that overeating, which Goosie loves to do, can cause soft stool and even diarrhea in kittens, so we’ve been testing out a restricted diet for her. So far, so good. And Duck is just underweight, and trying to convince me to adopt him. He makes a good case for it.

If you know anything about me by now, you are wondering how I am surviving with only 3 kittens in my home. Ok, so maybe I am a glutton for punishment. One of the foster coordinators sent a note saying that they needed to get kittens out of the shelter, and I happily answered the call. I asked for bottle-feeders since the shelter finally knows that I am experienced enough to handle that sort of challenge. As it turned out, 7 kittens, one of whom is a loner who got added in, came to the shelter the day I was able to make time and room for them.

They all have Twilight names. You had to know it was coming.

At this point, Bella, Edward and Renée have struggled a bit. Renée had diarrhea on the first day and wouldn’t eat, but a night of fluids and Nutri-Cal seemed to solve her trouble. Edward threw up about 6 times last night (roughly every 2 hours), and Bella threw up a little today and abstained from a meal. My new policy is “If you throw up or have diarrhea today, you are getting sub-q fluids.” So far, I think it’s a winning strategy. Edward is the only one who worries me still. A few of the kittens have been interested in wet food, so I think that it won’t be too demanding to care for all the babies and make sure the sick ones get the special looking-after they need.

The big kittens are jealous of the new babies. When I bring the babies and the bottle out, Goose comes up to them to hiss. Even sweet Duck (aka Mellow Yellow) made it clear that he was not willing to accept kittens who might be cuter than him. I swore to all the kittens that they were equally cute to me, but when little Alice tried to play with Goose when I had her out for feeding-time, Goosie growled. They won’t really have to interact at any point, so I am not worried.

I hope to have more completed projects of various sorts to show you in the next few days, and I really hope not to have to report any kitten casualties. I think life will be easier when we can put all of our rooms back the way they belong. Here’s hoping.

Dude, where’s my camera?

After taking a week off, I decided to finish the hardwood flooring project. The living room is done, but I needed to finish the hallway and connected office. The thing is, in the midst of all the furniture removal, my camera disappeared. It’ll show up, along with one of the knitting needles I was using for the sweater I am making out of my handspun yarn. I just can’t tell when.

What the missing camera means is that you’ll just have to believe me when I give you updates about the floor. You’ll also have to have a little faith that I didn’t murder all the kittens and bury them in the back yard.

In kitten news, Sylph’s foot seems to have improved. She only occasionally limped for the first few days, and now I can’t see any limping at all. Duck still refuses to do anything evil. He even answers to his name when I call him. So does my little Lamb-chop. Maybe I need both of them. Sigh.

Regarding my knitting, the unprecedented happened yesterday: I finally admitted defeat. I was knitting socks one-inside-the-other. The process was easy enough; I knit the back sock with my right hand the front sock with my left. It’s just that it took FOREVER to make any progress. I finally separated the socks last night, and I don’t think I will be doing that method again. I did learn something interesting from that experience, though – when I knit with both hands, my gauge is tighter. You can see clearly where I switched methods of knitting each sock. Oh well, it tells a story.

So, that’s it for now. When my camera comes home (I think it ran off on vacation with my knitting needle), I’ll make it show you pretty things.

Before they Hatch.

I should learn never to point out that all the kittens are well. When I do that, I invite the irony gods to come down and smite me.

Last night, around 1:00am, I heard a very unusual, very scary scream from one of the kittens. I immediately got up to look for the screamer, when I saw Sylph hobbling around on 3 legs. Her right rear leg was held up like a flamingo while she moved. I touched it and she cried, and I couldn’t tell if it was dislocated, broken, or otherwise. We took her to the emergency vet.

All we could do in the middle of the night is get her pain meds. We could have had her x-rayed, but if something was found, they couldn’t do anything about it until the next day when a surgeon came on duty.

This morning Michael took Sylph to the shelter for the x-ray and follow up care. No one could find a fracture, so the best guess is that she sprained her ankle. She is on pain meds until she can walk normally, which I actually think will be tomorrow.

Isn’t life with kittens exciting?

If the Shoe Fits

Wear it!

Duck is also as cute as they come.

Notice the pot belly? He likes to eat. It’s his favorite sport, next to sitting in my lap and purring. He’d better turn evil soon or I might have to keep him. That is the secret to successful fostering for me: at about 2 months old, just when the kittens get ready physically to go back, they turn evil. They run amok, hiding from me when I try to put them away. They break things. And they poop behind my desk. This one refuses to be that way, and it’s making trouble for me.

I’m just happy that they all seem well. Yea kittens!